I'm not shifting blame, I'm asking if the problem is as big as people are making it out to be.

Yeah there's BB hiccups immediately after an important session, especially if there's a 'controversy' for people to rapid-post over. And if the forum goes down people are constantly refreshing and/or rushing to the feedback forum to say "it's down again". But when it happens I wait 5-10 minutes(I can usually find something else to do) and when I come back it's fine.

Hell if they introduced a 5 to 10 minute delay from hitting reply to being able to post the BB would be a lot more fun overall

It's not ideal, but I'm not seeing it as this super-critical thing or major inconvenience. I'd prefer they prioritise other issues on the site than the forum creaking when heavily loaded. It's already much improved over where we were months(maybe a year?) ago when it was really clogged up. And for some of us old-timers its probably the smoothest the BB has ever been.

Speaking as an oldtimer, until about a year ago I had zero issues ever in how the forum worked, but this past year it have been poor, as a number of posters have pointed out fixing it would be trivial and very cheap, the choice not to fix it is the bigger mystery.

People would register and that would only take up more query's to the database (a registered member does more query's than a non-registered member).

If they have the forum optimized (gzip, php cache, mysql cache) then the only thing left is to add a new server just for MySQL.

That's 200~ €/month. I'm sure they can afford that. And if they don't, I'm sure a hosting company would sponsor them if they put a banner like "Powered by X servers"

My honest opinion is that they don't care too much about it being down sometimes as it works most of time, but for us, fans, it crashes in the most critical moments, after X happened, after races... and that's just unacceptable.

As common with many busy websites the DB is the bottleneck / point of failure under load.

There are a couple of way of reducing the load, one would be to stick some reverse proxies in front of the site and cache all pages for a 30 seconds or so - long enough to reduce load on the DB, short enough to keep things up to date - so that the DB isn't hit as often.

Most of the stuff on here doesn't change very often so some pages could be cached for much longer - challenge is if someone edits and old thread

This in not directly related to Server too busy error, but i'm having terrible time using forum this weekend. When i try to load any Forum page i often get blank page with status stuck at "Waiting: cdn.code.haymarket.com... ". Refreshing does not help - the page finally loads but often several minutes later.

This in not directly related to Server too busy error, but i'm having terrible time using forum this weekend. When i try to load any Forum page i often get blank page with status stuck at "Waiting: cdn.code.haymarket.com... ". Refreshing does not help - the page finally loads but often several minutes later.

I blocked this website in Firefox by adding its url to the AdBlock list and it cured the problem.

I seem to be doing a lot of apologising at the moment - with regards to the servers, we have been experiencing record amounts of traffic in the last month (probably owing to the rather exciting start to the F1 season). We are aware of the situation, and the need to upgrade the whole forum system (from functionality through to hosting etc).

We only have a small dev team but it is on the roadmap of jobs to fix; though I can't give you a solid ETA for the fix being implemented at this time.

Please bear with us, I know it's frustrating at times and I thank you all for your patience and support, we will get it sorted as soon as we can.

Maybe one solution is not to have the forum open during races. Make everyone go into live chat. That might ease the strain on this bit a little - after all it seems a bit pointless to have posts in both.

This is ridiculous...the forum has been almost unusable tonight...the race finished more than two hours ago and I am still getting "Server Too Busy" and "IPS Driver Error". It never used to be like this. What is going on?!

Maybe one solution is not to have the forum open during races. Make everyone go into live chat. That might ease the strain on this bit a little - after all it seems a bit pointless to have posts in both.

Problem with that is; lap one, big accident involving Vettel, Alonso and Hamilton all taking each other out, lots of people lose interest in the race itself and instead want to attribute blame in a thread dedicated for the purpose.

Click the session and then chit chat away. I agree that the performance is frustrating when it's busy but the forum and Bulletin Board software generally didn't really anticipate hundreds of people F5-ing across multiple car threads and posting brief messages. That is what the live system was intended for.

I seem to be doing a lot of apologising at the moment - with regards to the servers, we have been experiencing record amounts of traffic in the last month (probably owing to the rather exciting start to the F1 season). We are aware of the situation, and the need to upgrade the whole forum system (from functionality through to hosting etc).

We only have a small dev team but it is on the roadmap of jobs to fix; though I can't give you a solid ETA for the fix being implemented at this time.

Please bear with us, I know it's frustrating at times and I thank you all for your patience and support, we will get it sorted as soon as we can.

The forums would have dealt with this level of traffic far worse 10 months ago. We made a lot of improvements last year to help the forums withstand the level of traffic that we get around F1 events (which is why you shouldn't see the forums go completely offline for an hour or more as happened in the first half of 2012), but the peak level of traffic which the forums get has risen again during that time so there's a certain element of having had had to run just to stand still.

We've got more technical improvements planned this year, so hopefully we can outpace the growth of the spike in traffic which hits us around testing and F1 weekends.

As Buttoneer suggested earlier in this thread, though, if you want to discuss the live goings on during practice then you certainly have the option of the chat panel beneath the AUTOSPORT Live coverage rather than hammering refresh on the forums. You can log into this with your forum ID, and your comments will appear with your forum name.

During the middle of a working day. Bodes well.

There's no reduction in traffic when a test takes place on a working day. If anything, we get slightly MORE traffic as a lot of people read AUTOSPORT when their bosses would probably rather they did some work!

There's no reduction in traffic when a test takes place on a working day. If anything, we get slightly MORE traffic as a lot of people read AUTOSPORT when their bosses would probably rather they did some work!

And shouldn't you be pleased about that? (proudly written from my office on my work computer!)

Absolutely - my comment was in answer to the suggestion that the forum's servers would be under less strain on a weekday than a day when people were accessing the site from home. If you want to visit AUTOSPORT from the office, we're here for you! That's why we put out just as much content on AUTOSPORT Live when testing takes place during the working week, and it's why we regularly update the site every weekday (so long as something newsworthy is going on).

Of course, if a few more people could convince their IT managers to upgrade their computers so that we didn't have to support the very old versions of Internet Explorer, we'd be even happier...

Absolutely - my comment was in answer to the suggestion that the forum's servers would be under less strain on a weekday than a day when people were accessing the site from home. If you want to visit AUTOSPORT from the office, we're here for you! That's why we put out just as much content on AUTOSPORT Live when testing takes place during the working week, and it's why we regularly update the site every weekday (so long as something newsworthy is going on).

Of course, if a few more people could convince their IT managers to upgrade their computers so that we didn't have to support the very old versions of Internet Explorer, we'd be even happier...

Several websites have officially dumped support for older browsers, IE6/7, etc. You should consider dumping it too. People have internet access on mobile phone too on work and during the break they can go there, so there's an option for you to shift to.

Been locked out pretty much since my last post here give or take ten minutes. This needs sorting, come on guys. 48 hours of inaction with only brief recoveries isn't something I've had to put up with before, even on our university website which is FAR too complex for its own good.